Springtime Remodeling

Hope is the color of Springtime, the shimmery, lacy green lighting the hillside all the way to the top.

Does anyone choose their room color according to season? She sat on the floor in the middle of her decimated dining room and thought how it didn’t matter what anyone else did. Nobody existing on her budget should be drinking twenty-dollar mail-order coffee, either, but here she was, consuming it daily by the gallon. Because, well, coffee.

But back to the dining room.

Or, rather the ruin of the dining room and its much-anticipated rebirth.
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The room caught the light, which was both its saving grace and its undoing. Because, while the sunlight polished the piano and glowed in the cupboard glass, it also highlighted the water stains in the old wood floor and the dismal condition of the ancient paneling.

And she could have lived with that, but the same sunlight warmed the outside walls and drew the snakes, who nested in the hollow spaces between the studs and sometimes dropped out where the paneling gapped. 

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So. New drywall. Overhaul, mud and sand. White dust everywhere. Her husband tracked it onto the carpet. Her cat left pawprints on the counter. Winter should have been the perfect time for a project of such proportions; short days and purple evening light should have been just right. But she hadn’t anticipated bad tempers and spilled Kilz Latex, the way the grittiness that coated every surface would begin to sift into her brain and make her restless.

Restless for . . . green. Jeweled leaves and emerald grass. The gossamer shine of lacewings, the metallic sheen of dragonflies. Lily pads or pondwater or anything besides the relentless January sludging the landscape outside her window.

She craved spring the way a sailor craves oranges.

And she thought that perhaps an indoor spring could be created. These walls . . . a pale, pale color called Irish Tune, a frosted shade, like skunk cabbage leaves. Lace curtains at the windows to catch the light and dapple it across the floor, a border patterned with hummingbirds and butterflies, just enough pink to catch the eye.

She could almost smell the colors – something like mint juleps and new tomato plants. Colors that sounded like baseball games and Sunday radio; colors soft as moss. And when she thought of the way that Spring would be there, every time she entered that room, even in the depths of winter, it seemed that a bit of January thawed and receded. Nighttime held off just a breath longer than it had the day before, and, maybe, there was hope.

And hope was green. ​